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Comment by jacquesm | Hacker News Reader

That's a very impressive piece of work. I've worked on a (much!) simpler SDLC card and wrote the firmware for it (someone else did the hardware), it was already quite a chunk of work to get that up and running and stable enough to process production data with. Eventually only several 10's of these were built but they worked until the whole system was decommissioned on account of obsolescence (more than a decade later).

What you've built there would run circles around what I was involved in. Does the hardware still exist?

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Thanks. Yes, I was pretty proud of what we built. We had two orders of magnitude price-performance advantage over the state of the art for about a year, but before we could get any significant market share, gigabit ethernet came along (and the price of fast ethernet dropped) and that wiped us out. But it was fun while it lasted.

The hardware kind of exists. I have two prototype boards in my closet but they haven't been powered on in 30 years. I also don't know where the code for the device drivers is any more, though I have a box full of old hard drives that probably has it somewhere. Maybe some digital archeologist will dig it up some day.

To give proper credit where it is due, the idea and hardware design for Flownet were the work of Mike Ciholas, who went on to found a very successful hardware design company [1]. I wrote the device drivers and did the marketing, which is probably one of the reasons we failed. Turns out I'm terrible at marketing.

[1] https://www.ciholas.com/

Well, there are probably a couple of old timers on HN who really appreciate the kind of skill that it took, even though it doesn't show in your bank balance.

It also makes me very grateful for the magic that goes on behind the scenes whenever I plug in a high speed USB device and it 'just works', the kind of wizardry involved for this sort of thing is highly underappreciated.

Very true. Ironically, my career has come full-circle and I am now working for Intel doing chip design (actually working on developing tools that do chip design). The process of producing modern state-of-the-art chips is truly mind-blowing.

I watched that 'indistinguishable from magic' video and that is indeed the only appropriate way to describe it, and if our base tech would not improve from this point forward I'd say that is a job well done.

But I also have a soft spot for the GA144, which represents the other extreme, it's what one man can do versus what a whole team of talented engineers can do.

Judging by your alias: Are you the guy with Lisp EDA tools?

It's the guy I work for, not me, but yes.

Intel is actually using Lisp in its tools? Can you tell more about your job?

> Intel is actually using Lisp in its tools?

Yes.

> Can you tell more about your job?

This is my boss giving a talk about the tool:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oGQd-suLvzQ

It was developed at a startup called Barefoot Networks, which was acquired by Intel a few years ago.

What else do you want to know?

Is your work related in any way to Symbolics NS, beyond using the same language? Maybe you're reusing some public knowledge from the papers that were published about it?

Is your team hiring? I'm working at Intel, though far from hardware design - in the MPI library's team. In my spare time I learned Common Lisp and some basics of hardware design, so I would be happy to make my hobbies relevant to my job and work with you.

Ping me on Teams.

The preamble in that flownet document is a wonderful description of busy wires and switched networks.

Thanks. CSMA/CD is a thing of the past. All networks are switched nowadays. FlowNet was among the first LAN designs to be exclusively switched.

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